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Peel back the layers of the San Diego State men’s basketball roster, drill down into the players’ pasts, sift through the evidence to find the epicenter, and you arrive at a creaky high school gymnasium in Bakersfield with a freshman point guard and a 31-year-old head coach.

The point guard was Tim Shelton. The coach was Justin Hutson.

They are together again, riding a bus Tuesday night up Interstate 5 to Anaheim, to the Honda Center for SDSU’s game against UConn on Thursday, to the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet 16. But the journey started 7½ years ago, 230 miles from San Diego, in that sultry Bakersfield High gym.

Hutson would leave the following year to become an assistant coach at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and Shelton transferred out of Bakersfield High. In July 2006, in the middle of the summer recruiting frenzy, Hutson was hired as SDSU’s assistant coach and recruiting coordinator.

One of his first calls was to Shelton, whom he was recruiting at Cal Poly and whom he insists he would have landed there had he stayed (Shelton’s older brother, Titus, played there). He sold Shelton — now a 6-foot-7 power forward — on the greater opportunities at Montezuma Mesa, that coach Steve Fisher’s program was going places.

The first chunk of championship mortar was laid.

“I remember the first time I spoke with Tim on the phone,” Fisher says. “I called Justin right after that and told him, ‘It doesn’t matter what kind of player he is. We gotta have him. He is the kind of person you win with.’

“It’s guys like Tim who have allowed us to be 34-2. You can go right through the roster. They all have that character.”

The rest of the roster took shape over the ensuing years, from high schools, from prep academies, from junior colleges, from Division I schools, from France and Chicago and Sacramento and a tiny town in the high desert. They arrived through coaching connections, through keen talent evaluation, through serendipity. Through, Fisher admits, “a little bit of luck.”

The next addition was Billy White, an athletic forward from Las Vegas who happened to play with Shelton on the Fresno-based Elite Basketball Organization club and accompanied him on the same 2006 recruiting trip. White was considered an academic risk, and SDSU was the only school willing to take the gamble he would get eligible. (He would.)

Then came guard D.J. Gay, who most people thought wasn’t a true point guard and too small to play the 2. And who had orally committed to UC Irvine.

“Coach Hut stayed on me, stayed on me, stayed on me,” Gay says. “He said, ‘How are you going to make a decision without taking a visit here?’ So I did, and the rest is history.”

While recruiting Gay, the Aztecs also were interested in Quinton Watkins of Compton Dominguez High. Watkins went to Illinois instead, didn’t make it through the fall semester, switched to SDSU and then was on the move again for reasons that, Hutson says, “nobody knows to this day.”

But while he was at Illinois, Watkins met 6-11 center Brian Carlwell. And when Carlwell decided to transfer after two seasons, he figured he’d follow Watkins to SDSU. The Aztecs never got Watkins, but they got Carlwell.

Crawford High’s Malcolm Thomas and Torrey Pines High’s James Rahon were “bounce backs,” local kids who initially went away and returned, Thomas from Pepperdine and Rahon from Santa Clara. The Aztecs had recruited both, hard, out of high school.

“Our coaching staff didn’t burn any bridges when they didn’t come,” Hutson says. “Nobody bad-mouthed them when they went somewhere else. We wished them luck.”

The jewel came in the fall of 2009, when the Aztecs got commitments from Chase Tapley and Kawhi Leonard, arguably the best high school players that year from Northern and Southern California.

Leonard is expected to leave for the NBA after this season, perhaps as a lottery pick in the June draft, but most elite schools showed only mild interest in him as a junior at Riverside MLK High. The knock on him: He was a classic ’tweener, not big enough to play the post, not good enough on the perimeter to play guard.

“I might not have been his first call, I might not have been his first letter, but I was the first guy to really recruit him,” says Hutson, who first watched Leonard as a junior. “He instantly became our No. 1 priority.”

Leonard signed a letter of intent in November, then had a monster senior season. By time the big boys came calling, it was too late.

“They were loyal to me from the beginning and didn’t shy away from me,” Leonard says of the Aztecs staff. “So I came here.”

Fisher smiles at the memory and says: “The group that we have were all good basketball players. But with some of them, with a lot of them, other people said, ‘They might not do this or they might not do that.’”

Gay was an undersized off guard, Leonard didn’t have a position, White didn’t have grades, Tapley and Shelton both had major leg injuries in high school …

“That’s the thing about our staff,” Fisher says. “When they say, ‘I want him. We’ve got to get him,’ they don’t worry about what all these other people think, what the scouting services say. They just go out and get him.”

And they have Fisher, who can show recruits an NCAA championship ring, who can talk about his three trips to the Final Four, who can talk to their parents about the Fab Five, who can assure a mother that her baby will grow into a man.

“I’m developing the list, I’m cultivating the list, I’m working the list,” says Hutson, the recruiting coordinator. “But with Coach Fisher’s name behind it, it’s a lot easier. A lot easier. And he’s the best closer I’ve ever seen.”